"Angel of the ideal" : philosophical idealism and the Victorian woman poet

This thesis aims to recognize the underexplored philosophical idealism in the poetry of five Victorian women: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, George Eliot, Mathilde Blind, and Constance Naden. The Introduction establishes that, in recent years, an emphasis on how these women engage with various Victorian materialisms has overshadowed the original responses they develop to idealism in their letters, journals, prose, and especially their poetry. While some of this idealism is inevitably inherited from Romantic figures, I focus instead on how my poets read, understand, and adapt the work of idealist philosophers themselves, from Plato and Immanuel Kant to G.W.F. Hegel and the British Idealists. I examine how their reception of these figures shapes how they consider a diverse range of issues, from science, evolution, religion, and revolution to the relationship between appearance and reality, mind and body, and self and other. While these issues intersect across the chapters, I approach each poet through a particular lens: judgment, forms, aesthetics, history, and unity. Throughout, there is an awareness of the problems idealism poses for the feminine subject. However, by including feminist criticism, I highlight how these women do not shy away from but self-consciously engage with the troubling aspects of idealism. While, at times, it is impossible for them to resolve questions about their status as women writers in relation to this philosophy, the thesis overall retains a historicist focus to foreground a very crucial point: these women placed value in and sought after the ideal. It is from this historicist standpoint, considering idealism as a vital rather than outdated philosophy, that one can begin to consider how it was redefined by those peripheral to a male philosophical tradition. This research thus offers a way into rethinking idealism’s relationship to Victorian Studies.